There is a chance, and maybe a good chance, that it will rain in the Arkansas River Valley on Friday and Saturday. That’s because Tropical Storm Isaac could blow into south Arkansas early Friday, the National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center said Monday.

Maps projecting the storm’s path over 120 hours has Isaac hitting south Arkansas as a tropical depression at 2 a.m. Friday with winds of 35 mph and gusts of 45 mph after losing tropical storm intensity in Louisiana. That system might blow to the north and west into the Arkansas River Valley bring as much as a couple inches of rain.

Meteorologist Chris Buonanno, with the National Weather Service in Little Rock, told The Courier Monday that while it is still too early to predict just where Isaac will travel, where it will make landfall, and then where it will go from that point, there is a pretty good chance that some rain from the storm will make its way to the Natural State Friday and Saturday.

“The National Hurricane Center is expecting Isaac to effect Arkansas in some fashion,” he said. “No one is just sure what will happen at this moment. It all is still a few days away.”

Buonanno said he would expect the Russellville area “to get an inch or two” of rainfall if all goes according to current expectations.

“But there still is a lot of uncertainty about this science,” Buonanno said. “We’ll know a lot more in one or two more days.”

The promise of any rainfall is happy news for drought-stricken Arkansas, but the news isn’t so good for Louisiana where the state was gearing up Monday for what has become an almost familiar Labor Day week event.

On Sunday, Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency, and officials in some coastal parishes either ordered evacuations or strongly suggested people leave low-lying areas.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu also declared a state of emergency but said there are no plans to evacuate the city. Landrieu urged residents to hunker down and prepare for the possibility for several days without power.

Isaac was most likely to land ashore Wednesday, the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

In 2011, Tropical Storm Lee struck over the Labor Day period, and Hurricane Gustav hit over the Labor Day weekend in 2008. Katrina struck Aug. 29, 2005.